Tag: Mobile

The EHR maker will also be featuring innovations in longitudinal health records, cloud services, machine learning and more to help customers manage value-based contracting.

“We’ll showcase our collaboration with Apple to make health records available at your fingertips in the Apple Health app,” said Cerner President Zane Burke.

HIMSS18 will be a pivotal one for Cerner in many ways. It’s the first with new CEO Brent Shafer, who has big shoes to fill as the first outside hire to lead the company since founder and longtime CEO Neal Patterson passed away last summer.

And it comes as the company has arguably more big projects on its to-do list than ever, including the massive ongoing MHS Genesis project for the U.S. Department of Defense and the upcoming contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs – to its continuing innovation on any number of fronts, from consumerism to the cloud, interoperability to artificial intelligence.

“Recently, Cerner and Apple worked together to make personal health information accessible on a consumer platform, and we’re working with a range of partners and clients to turn up the heat on the conversation about interoperability,” Cerner President Zane Burke said. “We’ll showcase our collaboration with Apple to make health records available at your fingertips in the Apple Health app.”

Burke added that Cerner will also be offering a look at virtual health solutions that empower individuals to manage their health via telemedicine and remote monitoring technologies as well as intelligent solutions for hospitals as they adjust to rising costs and value-based care.

“We’re at a pivot point with the digitization of health information, and we are redefining the idea of ‘care.’” Burke said. “We’re moving from managing patient encounters to providing for the well-being of populations.”

Cerner is particularly focused on the growing clout of the healthcare consumer and is committed to activating and engaging patients to be more proactive in their own health. Central to this work is the agility and speed offered by cloud technology, and Burke said Cerner continues to work with leading companies in industries other than healthcare to build on its own cloud-based offerings.

Cerner’s founding membership in the CommonWell Health Alliance – which was first announced five years ago at HIMSS13 – is one way to help innovate on the interoperability front, he said, and the company is committed to the co-creation of an open platform for innovation by leveraging FHIR standards through its work with the Argonaut Project.

More fluid data exchange, particularly with the DoD, was a major driver for the contract Cerner was awarded for the VA’s new EHR this past June, of course. Although the contract is currently on pause while MITRE does an independent assessment of its specifications, Burke said the VA project ultimately will “not only create seamless care for our nation’s veterans, it will also fundamentally change interoperability in the commercial healthcare space — something we are very excited about.”

Population health management is another imperative in the era of value-based reimbursement, and it’s another area “where Cerner continues to grow,” he said. “Providers need data that is actionable at an individual and community level to improve care. Cerner is uniquely positioned, through our cloud-based platform HealtheIntent, to pull all those data points together, aggregate and normalize the data and feed it back into the workflow for clinicians to act on.”

And analytics to help mine that data for the most useful insights are fast-evolving too – largely driven by lightning-fast advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which “remain a key focus for Cerner,” said Burke.

He pointed to early efforts such as the Cerner HealtheDataLab technology, which offers a secure environment where researchers and data scientists can “query de-identified data, extract and transform data sets in research-ready formats, build complex models and algorithms and validate findings in a single elastic environment.”

The most-downloaded health apps on iPhone and Android app stores reveal where Americans are turning to take control of health issues.

A new year means it’s time to comply with new resolutions for many people. Most often, that means targeting health and wellness. A Google search analysis conducted last January showed that getting healthy was the most popular resolution, with more than 62 million searches, almost double the second-most-searched New Year’s resolution: getting organized.

The ubiquity of smartphones in daily life makes it easier than ever to make a resolution related to health — sticking to it is something else. App tracker App Annie provided CNBC with data on the most popular free versions of health and wellness apps from 2017 based on both the Apple and Android app-store downloads. The data was through Dec. 28, 2017.

As technology giants such as Apple, Amazon and Google get serious about remaking the health-care sector, these results show how Americans are using their phones to take more control of their health, and the specific health issues that are proving to be most app-friendly.

Dive Brief:

Smartphones are ubiquitous in today’s culture, but many healthcare organizations are still figuring out how to leverage them to support providers and patient outcomes, a new KLAS Research report concludes.

Shared-use smartphones that are under an organization’s control can build out the clinician tool kit and increase efficiencies by enabling mobile access to patient data. Other options include personal use phones, usually reserved for physicians and management, and “bring your own device” (BYOD) programs that allow employees to access and share personal health information.

Meanwhile, nearly 76% of practices use mobile health on a weekly basis, but half of those use it five hours or less, according to the Physicians Practice 2018 Mobile Health Survey. More than 22% of practices use mHealth six to 10 hours a week, while just 27% use it more than 10 hours.

Dive Insight:

The Apple iPhone’s ease of use and broad application library have made it the go-to choice for shared-use phones, but weaknesses could cause other companies to gain ground, according to the KLAS report. Drawbacks include cost, poor Wi-Fi connectivity, no built-in barcode scanner and inability to switch batteries between different iOS models. The iPhone also lacks ruggedization — a feature required for it to be considered healthcare grade.

By contrast, Zebra (previously Motorola) offers a healthcare grade smartphone, is more durable and has an integrated scanner, the report notes. “Two EHR and secure communications vendors now favor Zebra over Apple due to Apple’s inadequacies.”

Organizations issuing personal-use devices almost exclusively use Apple, while half also offer Samsung primarily as a secondary device. The primary use of these phones is communicating with the care team and accessing EHRs. But again, some of the same limitations — like poor WiFi connectivity — apply. While Apple is seen as more secure, Samsung wins on flexibility.

Unless organizations ban personal smartphones, KLAS recommends having a corporate BYOD program to keep the phones HIPAA-compliant when employees access patient data. Successful programs should include stipends to support usage of approved personal phones, an approved secure messaging app, remote device security and lockdown and means to access EHRs.

The Physicians Practice survey shows practices using mHealth for a variety of purposes, with the chief one being communicating with staff (70%). The next most common usage is mobile EHR application (51%), followed by communication with providers (50%) and education on clinical issues (47%).

The National Institute for Standards and Technology developed a practice guide on mobile device security that describes enterprise mobility management, in which a profile is installed on a device to enable monitoring and control. The problem, according to critics, is that staff in organizations that permit BYOD don’t want their personal devices monitored.